It’s very important to make an animal farm in Minecraft. Animals don’t just give you food, but they also give you a lot of different materials.
Chickens are an animal that you can easily breed and use their resources for crafting items and foods, such as pumpkin pies or cakes.
But it’s no fun closing them in a tiny square pen. It’s nice to create an area specifically for the animal. So, in this article we will show you a few different ways how to build a chicken coop in Minecraft.
Building the Coop
You will not need a lot of space when building your coop. For this basic designs you’ll need a minimal area of 8 by 8 blocks, but feel free to go bigger if you want.
Before you start building, prepare the area. Use podzol, muddy mangrove roots, and coarse dirt to replace the regular grass blocks that go under the coop. This adds a lot of nice detail to any animal enclosure.
Then, place down 4 fence posts to create a 3 by 5 rectangle. That’s going to be the size of your coop.
On each fence post place down a solid stair block, facing in, and then create the coop floor using spruce trap doors. Place the trapdoors in line with the top of the fence posts.
You can use wooden slabs instead of the trapdoors if it’s easier, but it will make the coop look bulkier. Before we start building the walls of our coop, we have to build a “ramp” for our chickens.
You can build a pretty good looking ramp by using rails.
Place a rail on the ground right in front of the block you wish to use as your coop’s door. Then, place another rail on the floor by crouching and right clicking. This will make the rails connect and the first rail will remain raised like a ramp even after you destroy the second rail.
Now we can build our walls.
This part may be a little tricky, because we’re still using trap doors. You will have to place them vertically. It’s easiest to do this by stacking them together like you see in the image below.
Since the chickens don’t need more than a single block of space, we just need a single line of walls before building the roof.
To keep the design neat and not too bulky, use slabs to shape the roof above the coop or trapdoors.
The chickens will be able to get inside whenever they want and it’ll look nice for your farm.
Other Designs
Of course, a chicken coop does not need to be so small and simple. You can go as big and creative as you would want.
This design is a lot bulkier and it uses slabs for the floor to look like it is elevated. It is big enough for the player to walk inside it.
You can even lead the chickens inside and make a door to keep them safe.
This design can also be expanded more by creating a chicken egg farm inside it.
It’s easiest to build a small area, a blocked off room inside of the coop. This is where you can close in a few chickens in one space and keep them from wandering off.
Putting a hopper and chest right under them will allow you to collect their eggs automatically whenever the chickens drop it.
You can use the eggs for cooking or to spawn more chickens in case you kill most of them or they die.
What to do Next
A chicken coop does not make a farm. Having a barn or stable is a very important structure where you can keep your larger animals much safer.
We have tutorial on how to build horse stables with several designs meant to fit anyone’s taste.